AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

This paper interrogates the intricate distinction between human beings and persons by re-evaluating John Locke’s framework of personal identity. Whereas human beings are defined by biological continuity, persons, according to Locke, are constituted by psychological continuity—principally the continuity of memory and self-awareness. Locke’s theory posits that a person remains identical over time by virtue of an unbroken chain of conscious experiences, even when the physical body persists despite episodes of amnesia or altered consciousness. This perspective challenges the reduction of personhood to mere biological persistence, arguing instead for a dynamic conception of identity anchored in reflective awareness and moral responsibility. Nonetheless, the theory faces formidable challenges: the phenomenon of false memory, the episodic disruptions seen in severe amnesia, and the complexities introduced by conditions such as dissociative identity disorder. These issues raise critical questions about the stability and unity of psychological continuity. Ultimately, while Locke’s approach advances a compelling alternative to substance-based theories, it also underscores the need for further refinement to fully capture the multifaceted nature of personal identity.

The concept of narrative is widespread in the literature on dreams, spanning the humanities, psychology, and cognitive science. Yet, this term and its associated conceptual aspects often remain undefined and insufficiently investigated. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literature theory, and semiotics, there has been virtually no investigation of how preconceptions about the resemblance between fictional narratives and retrospective dream reports have shaped the philosophical debate on dreams and dreaming. This paper aims to address this gap. We argue that there is a pervasive tendency to metonymically assimilate fictional narratives first to dream reports and then to dreams themselves. As a result, features and devices typically associated with literary fiction are frequently used as a significant conceptual framework to understand dreams and the processes underlying their formation, encoding, and retrieval. To illuminate this tendency, we focus on two central categories in the philosophy of dreaming: authorship and composition. These categories often structure debates concerning the ontology and epistemology of dreams. By examining relevant cases in which these categories are employed to support divergent theoretical positions, we argue that similar accounts often rest on a shared—yet frequently unacknowledged—assumption: that dreams exhibit a narrative structure and that dreaming is, at its core, a process of narrative construction.

One of the great mysteries that characterizes our time is the hard problem of consciousness. How is it that physical things like brains give rise to subjective experience? The problem continues to remain stubbornly unresolved despite decades of intense research, and this has motivated some of us to turn a critical eye back on the assumptions embedded within the question itself. One worry is that framing the hard problem using the “gives rise” locution implicitly assumes dualism by smuggling in a separation between the brain and consciousness, putting physicalism at a dialectical disadvantage as a result. I offer a more sustained analysis of this longstanding dispute than has hitherto been provided and conclude that physicalists should indeed abandon the gives rise framing of the problem of consciousness. However, another (and more substantial) worry is that the longer the hard problem remains intractable, the more reason we have for thinking its most foundational assumption is faulty. Namely, the denial that consciousness is fundamental.
 

Prima facie, perception makes us directly aware of particular objects and property-instances, and enables us to make knowledgeable de re reference to them. Call this the strong referential character of experience. Explaining strong referential character of experience is a desideratum for all theories of perception, and some naive realists argue that they give the best explanation of the strong referential character of experience: we refer to particular objects and property-instances because they constitute our experience. Against naive realists, I defend a a dual-component theory, which states that to perceive x as F is to be aware of sensory qualities and to have a belief that x is F. I motivate two more implications. First, the strong referential character that naive realists posit is not a completely true datum: we do make knowledgeable de re references, but it's not in virtue of being directly aware of particular objects and property-instances. Second, our intuitions about how perception influences further cognition and action seem to be better honoured by positing perceptual beliefs or belief-like states, and as such, dual-component views deserve more attention.

Daniel Dennett was a compatibilist. He attempted to carve some elbow room for freedom of decision-making by inserting some indeterminism in his ‘practical free will’ model. The purpose of inserting indeterminism in decision-making processes was to break the causal chain of hard determinism and to provide a source for novelty not already implicit in past events. This would explain creativity and also allow for indeterminism required for free will. However, he falls short of allowing indeterminism to break the causal chain and accepting that free will could reconnect it with novel links. The ‘practical free will’, he says, ‘installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all’. This cautious acceptance of indeterminism in causal chains did not succeed, because it was randomness that he was inserting, not indeterminism of well-defined alternatives. I will demonstrate a form of indeterminism based on the instability and criticality of some physical states, which offers well-defined alternatives in the physical world at the classical (not quantum) level. This form of indeterminism fits perfectly into causal chains and opens the door to reconciling libertarian free will with the physicalism of the world more elegantly than Dennett's model.

Ineffability is widely regarded as one of the key features of subjective phenomenal experience by both physicalists and non-physicalists. The idea is that such experience, often conceptualized in terms of qualia, is not expressible in terms of public language, and thus scientific investigation can only target the objective, public aspects of the world and not such subjective aspects. Physicalists typically employ accounts under the umbrella term “phenomenal concept strategy” to explain this ineffability; yet, the resulting idea about the relationship between phenomenal and theoretical concepts appears incomplete, as it leads to the implausible consequence that phenomenal information is completely isolated and practically useless. Here, I propose a new account of phenomenal ineffability and phenomenal concepts that clarifies these issues while offering a deflationary reconstruction. Drawing on the Enlightenment distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities in a non-literal way, this account explains why certain phenomenal concepts remain untranslatable into theoretical concepts, and vice versa.

In the Sally-Anne false belief task (Wimmer & Perner 1983), autistics and three year-olds ascribe beliefs to others based on their own knowledge of the truth rather than on the other person's justified beliefs. This phenomenon is known as the "reality bias" or "curse of knowledge." I suggest that several famous philosophical puzzles arise from the same intuition, that is the theorist's knowledge of how the world really is (eg Gettier). For Donnellan (1974) the semantics of language may only be given from the "outside" by the "omniscient observer of history" and Kripke's puzzle cases of naming arise from "ignorance and error" on the part of a subect. Burge (1988) says “We take up a perspective on ourselves from the outside” and Kaplan (2012) says that the theorist “surveys another’s thought” from a point of view “independent of whether the subject’s thought corresponds to reality.” That is, philosophers make the same mistake that children grow out of by the age of four. Chomsky (1962) warns “Reliance on the reader’s intelligence is so commonplace that its significance may be easily overlooked” and Fodor suggests “The question is not what is obvious to the theorist; the question is what follows from the theory.”

There is a pervasive folk view that feelings such as pain are causes of behaviour. We say we withdrew our hand from the hotplate because it hurt or that we flinched at the needle because it stung. The causal role of pain is widely implicated in theories of learning and decision-making. But what if this commonsense idea that feelings cause behaviour is just wrong? To date, there is no known mechanism for how subjectively experienced pain directly modulates neural activity and it is hard to see how there could be. Pain cannot open ion channels to generate action potentials. On this basis, we contend that the real cause of behaviour is neural activity and that feelings of pain have no known causal role. This raises the question of whether pain has any function at all—i.e., whether it has causal powers or is merely epiphenomenal. Epiphenomenalism faces the intractable problem of explaining how such an attention-consuming feeling as pain could be epiphenomenal and yet still have survived evolutionary selection. In response, we infer from the available neuroscientific evidence that the best explanation is that pain has a novel, non-causal function and that decisions to act are instead caused by an internal decoding process involving threshold detection of accumulated evidence of pain rather than by pain per se. Because pain is necessarily implicated in the best explanation of subsequent decision-making, we do not conclude that pain is epiphenomenal or functionless even if it has no causal influence over those decisions or actions that issue from those decisions. On this view, pain functions to mark neural pathways that are the causes of behaviour as salient, serving as a ground but not a cause of subsequent decision-making and action. This perspective has far-reaching implications for diverse fields including neuropsychiatry, biopsychosocial modelling, robotics and brain-computer interfaces.